An Introduction to Neo-Fatalism

We think of fate as an outdated superstition. In a secular world the future is ours to make. Yet our discourse about the future seems to be littered with inevitabilities: we are routinely informed that technological progress, war, AI, collapse, utopia and dystopia are inevitable. What is fate but the inevitable? On the more idiosyncratic fringes of AI discourse things get even weirder: we find self fulfilling prophecies, hyperstition, retrocausality and embedded agents as time travellers. I will argue that these are both manifestations of the same attitude to the future which I am dubbing neo-fatalism. I will try to explain what neo-fatalism is, how it operates both practically and metaphysically, and why understanding it is important for navigating discussions about the future.Neo-fatalism is characterised by fate that is contingent, emergent and immanent. It operates through self fulfilling prophecies, and it implies a metaphysics of time in which the future and the present are in constant interaction. The use of the prefix ‘neo’ is not intended to assert that this attitude is necessarily new. There are certainly echoes of it in classical stories of self fulfilling prophecy such as Oedipus Rex, or in the famous Weberian Calvinist doctrine of predetermination. However it draws a contrast with the classical understanding of fatalism as resignation to a prewritten destiny that is transcendent and inevitable.Fate and contingencyBut how can a future be destiny if it is contingent? Fundamentally this happens when the destiny of a system does not come from any creator or telos, but rather emerges from the behaviour of the system itself. This is a common phenomenon in complex systems theory, where systems may converge towards a stable attractor state, but this outcome cannot be predicted before actually running the system. We will look at what convergence, and attractor states look like from the outside, and then use an idea from second order cybernetics to see why these